


root + regenerate

by alder_knight



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: F/F, Fix-It, Future Fic, Healing, Immortals, Magic, Memory Loss, Post-Series, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Solarpunk, Trauma, Utena Future Zine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-11 22:42:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16861516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alder_knight/pseuds/alder_knight
Summary: What happens to revolutionary girls after the revolution?





	root + regenerate

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this piece for the [Utena Future Zine](https://utenafuturezine.tumblr.com/), which was meant to be published at the end of August 2018, but somehow the zine never materialized. I like this story, and it's finished, so I decided to share it on here. If the zine gets released, I'll update this note to link to it - the art I saw for it was gorgeous, so I hope it's just delayed!

On the third floor of a walk-up community health center, there is a small cozy office with two chairs and a desk. Behind the desk is a young woman in a cardigan with cream-painted nails and short dark hair. She is a graduate student at the city university, studying to become a therapist, and she works in this clinic to get hours for her degree. 

Across from her sits a pale 20-something with spiky pink hair, skinned knuckles, and a half-dozen mismatched necklaces. There is a ball-link chain around her neck, and she fiddles with the three charms on it while she struggles with her words: the hilt of a broken cocktail sword, hot pink; a silver ring with a rose imprinted in its flat top; the chipped-off handle from a broken porcelain teacup, sanded so the edges are soothingly smooth. 

"Bad sleep again," she says, running her thumb over the cup fragment. "More nightmares."

The upholstery of the chair is plush against her back, and she sinks into it a little, rigid posture melting with the ritual exhuming of her nightmares. The room smells faintly of the therapist's hand cream, a light floral that Utena is relieved to be unable to place. She studies the ridged floorboards.

"Similar to last week's?" the therapist asks, clicking her pen, "or new ones?"

"The same. The thorns and the choking and the swords and then falling, same as usual. They're getting more vivid, though. More frequent."

"How's your sleep been otherwise?"

"Not so good."

The therapist makes a note on her clipboard and Utena presses the broken cocktail sword into her thumb.

🌹

Anthy is riding in coach. She could have whatever train ticket she wanted, really, but coach is where the ragged travelers and the students and the parents with children ride, so she is also riding in coach. The countryside passes steadily outside the window while her pet carrier rocks in her lap. At her feet is a small white suitcase. Her pink dress is crisp and clean in spite of her weeks in transit. Laundry is not one of the things she's ever had to worry about. She has other ways of keeping clean.

Mortal feet are soft, though, and she is on this train in part because of the blisters that have started impeding her progress. She unbuckles her shoes and removes her socks to apply an ointment to her heels. Before the revolution, she muses, pain meant nothing. She would have walked on even if her feet were bloody and raw to the ankle. Now pain is intimate and close. It is not a thing apart from her, observable at distance. So she sits, she rides the train, she bandages her heels. Chu-Chu dozes in his carrier on her lap.

Feet tended to, Anthy leans against the window and lets herself doze as well.

🌹

In a warehouse in the riverport district, Utena receives a paper-wrapped parcel and a stack of stuffed envelopes. She loads up her messenger bag and slings it over her shoulder, making her way through the chattering throng to the side exit. A few acquaintances hail her, and she wishes them a good morning and safe travels. Once outside, she takes a moment to breathe. The sun is rising behind the windmills. She buckles her helmet, unlocks her bicycle, and starts work.

The bike lane along the riverfront takes her as far as the trolley depot, where she turns off into the streets to weave between streetcars and jaywalkers. Cycling all day is cathartic: she earns a decent living as a courier, she explores the city that's become home to her in the aftermath of the revolution, and she stays active. She's sure she must have been an athlete, before they found her, because exercise and movement come naturally to her. Staying seated and stationary leaves her stranded with her thoughts, but activity lets her breathe. It helps that staying active makes her hungry. When she first left the hospital, she kept forgetting to eat.

The first delivery is to a High Street townhouse painted turquoise and covered in suncatchers and wind chimes. The elderly gentleman who emerges to accept his mail smiles and tips her generously. Utena pockets the extra cash and whistles as she bikes away. It's a tune she remembers hearing played on piano. She isn't sure where she knows the melody from, and she decides not to think too hard about it.

🌹

Anthy looks at the front page of the newspaper handed to her as she exits the train and discovers that she has been traveling for five years.

It comes as a surprise. She has never been entirely comfortable with the concept of linear time, as, for so long, it simply hadn't applied to her. Five years was a meaningless duration before the revolution. Time passed for peasants, and later for students. It did not pass for her, not in the way it did for them. It had not passed for her brother. 

She looks down at her shoes. They are immaculately clean and white, but the soles are worn very thin. No wonder, she thinks, they have been causing her discomfort. They are intended for use by mortals. She must adapt her expectations.

Rather than continuing to another destination on another train, gently feeling her way forward, Anthy steps gingerly down from the train platform and into the pedestrian flow. Chu-Chu chirrups from within his carrier, so Anthy frees him to climb up on her shoulder and enjoy the sun. Feeling the cobbles through her beaten leather soles, she sets off towards the shopping district.

🌹

The brass key creaks a complaint as it turns in the lock, but the big wood and glass door swings open and Utena enters the foyer of her boarding house.

One of her many fellow tenants is washing dishes in the kitchen. "Tenjou!" she says brightly, looking over her shoulder. "You missed dinner! There's leftovers if you want them, though."

Utena smiles as she sets her bag on the countertop and pulls up a stool. "I stopped for noodles," she says as she cracks open a takeout container. "Thanks for thinking of me."

"You must've had a good day," her roommate remarks, and Utena hums assent around a mouthful of noodles.

The kitchen smells of drying herbs and lemon soap and coffee. Into that mix wafts the rich steam of her dinner. Utena tries to slow her bites and savor this treat: fat white noodles dyed golden in thick curry sauce, fragrant and spicy, with chunks of meat and fresh vegetables. Breakfast and dinner are included in her weekly room and board payments, so it is a bit of an extravagance to go out for restaurant food. Curry udon reminds her of something she cannot place, perhaps something from her life before the revolution. It is a comfort food, and she brings it home when she can. Perhaps she should learn to make it herself.

The thought makes her snort. Utena hasn't cooked much since the accident, and any skill she might have had for it before is decidedly absent now. She holds up chopsticks loaded with silky noodles, contemplating their color against the vase of sunflowers in the middle of the table, and then slurps them up, crunching sesame seeds and scallions. Her roommate dries her hands and heads upstairs, leaving Utena alone in the kitchen with her dinner.

🌹

The city is charming enough that Anthy decides to stay for a while. Something about it feels right - some remaining fragment of her magic resonates with something about this place. She decides to listen to that intuition and takes out a small apartment in a converted packing plant with large windows overlooking the river.

The place comes furnished, dark woods and floral upholstery. Anthy starts filling teacups and jars with cuttings of plants she passes on her walks. In a matter of weeks, the small space is verdant and fragrant, bursting with life and death. The small balcony terrace becomes a seedling nursery as she fills pots with earth and wild seeds.

One bright day, when she and Chu-Chu encounter a sign on their walk advertising a local farmer's market, they follow it. In a tree-lined cobblestone square, dozens of tables and carts overflow with vegetables, cheeses, hot loaves of bread, bundles of fragrant herbs. Anthy breathes deeply. She pays a few coins for a packet of cheese curds for Chu-Chu, and then approaches a wagon with cut flowers.

Their roses come in half a dozen vibrant hues. Her breath catches, heart quickening. Unselfconscious, Anthy buries her face in the blooms. For a perfect moment, she inhales and exhales and feels a tightness in her chest begin to unlock, as some hurting part of her tries to slide out.

Someone laughs. Startled, Anthy straightens up. Her heart snaps closed. Beside the cart is a young woman, perhaps in her late 50s or so, brown skin a shade lighter than Anthy's with silver in her very black hair. "An enthusiast of roses, Miss?" She is smiling warmly. Anthy's moment of panic dissipates. 

"Yes," she says simply. Chu-Chu squeaks and wriggles out from behind a cart wheel, still gnawing his cheese. She scoops him up and sets him on her shoulder before meeting the flower seller's eyes.

The woman effervesces a kind of bubbly friendliness that helps Anthy regain her calm. Her anxiety around crowds has vastly diminished since the revolution, but it still cuts into her when a stranger laughs. She and the gardener chat a while about rose cultivation.

"I have been looking for a new girl to help in the greenhouses, actually, if you're looking for a job."

"A job?" Being the Rose Bride was a full-time vocation, but it wasn't a job. Jobs pay compensation. There is a different word for a full-time job that isn't paid, and that you can't leave.

"Certainly! I can tell you're competent. Do you have a resume, dear?"

Anthy isn't sure what that means. "I'm sorry," she says, "I'm not from around here. Chu-Chu and I have been traveling for a long time."

The gardener gives an understanding nod. "Recently resettled, then? You're not the only new migrant to our city. Don't worry, we're happy to have you."

Anthy isn't sure what the gardener means when she starts talking about the Department of Immigrant Integration, but she and Chu-Chu leave the market that afternoon with a trio of lilac-colored roses and a business card with the address for the greenhouses.

🌹

Before dawn on one late summer morning, Utena startles herself awake, heart thundering in her throat. She tries to slow her breathing, remember her therapist's advice to take note of her surroundings, figure out what is real and what is dream. The room is cool but her skin is sweaty, so she kicks her sheets to the foot of the bed and flops back under the ceiling fan to pull herself together.

Repetitive nightmares have been a part of her life since the accident. She doesn't remember much of what came before. She suspects that Before comes in patches, sometimes, when her unconscious mind feels safe enough to slip her clues. It all comes out looking like fairy tales, though, and she wonders if maybe what she is remembering comes not from her own past but from favorite childhood stories. At this point she supposes she may never know.

Pushing her damp hair out of her face, she breathes deliberately and concentrates on the feel of her mattress supporting her, the fan's breeze drying her face, the faintly illuminated tangle of necklaces on her dresser, the smell of rain on the grass outside. _This is real_ , she tells herself, _I am in my room and there is nothing in here that is going to hurt me._

She knows that the way to avert disorientation and panic is to focus on being grounded and safe in the present. She wants to dig into her dreams, though. She doesn't know if there's information in them but trying to find out is irresistable. She breathes deep and slow again, and closes her eyes.

She is used to seeing choking vines covered in thorns, digging into her fingers, her limbs, her throat. Sometimes they burst with violent red roses, budding and blooming and dying, petals dripping off like blood - the smell of roses still gives her vertigo. Sometimes her back is pierced with a sword, right near her incision marks; sometimes it is pierced with hundreds of swords. Sometimes they fall out of the sky like arrows and drive into her unrelentingly until the cliff she's draped over gives way and she and they plummet together, hurled to the ground where she screams herself awake and curls up crying and shaking in her bed until the sun comes back up. In these dreams, she is always alone.

Tonight's dream started like the formula, she's sure of it: a mass of thorned vines gathering around her, tearing her clothes and skin, slowly and inexorably binding her to the rock ledge. Even after all this time, she fights them, in every single dream. She never gets away. Tonight, she thrashed her skin raw under their tearing teeth, prolonging the inevitable, and then at once the vines stopped curling. The thorns retracted. The brilliant white light of the clifftop dimmed, like a spotlight gradually turning off, and the cutting vines, though still holding her immobile, somehow staunched the pain and bleeding of her wounds. Panting and dazed, Utena looked up, and got a glimpse of a silhouette before the darkness became absolute.

Eyes still closed, she shakes her head. She wants to place the shadowy figure, but no distinguishing characteristics remain as her waking mind washes out the dream. There is one phrase bouncing around her mind: _"I came all this way to find you."_

Utena realizes there are tears leaking from her eyes, and she blinks. The first lights of an overcast dawn are threading through the rooftop gardens and spires. Her breaths come in shudders now, and she fights to keep them from becoming sobs.

She can't quite place the heartbroken, hopeful feeling, but she knows its genesis: in this dream, she wasn't alone.

🌹

Two months into working in the greenhouses, the gardener starts assigning Anthy some shifts at the farmer's market. At first she works with another, more experienced flower girl, learning the finer points of floral sales and display to supplement her existing green thumb. Later she starts taking one day a week all by herself. Chu-Chu keeps her company.

It is one such morning that she wakes before dawn, soft raindrops spattering her bedside window, and rises for a hot cup of tea with lemon in the window seat. She sips it quietly, humming to Chu-Chu, a song she used to play on the piano. She has seen an upright piano in the city plaza, available for any passerby who might wish to sit and play a while. Perhaps this week she will be brave enough to try it.

Tea finished, she braids her hair so it hangs long down her back, out of her face. She dresses in overalls and rubber boots and a rain slicker, says, "I'll be back later," to the houseplants, and heads out into the light rain with Chu-Chu peeking out of her pocket.

🌹

The morning rain is picking up as Utena parks her bike at the warehouse. Her sleeveless shirt is soaked through by the time she pushes her way to the pickup counter, shaking out the moisture that has made its way to her hair through her helmet.

"Tenjou! You're on a pickup today."

Utena takes an itinerary from the coordinator and steps back towards the wall to read it. Special order for a catering company, it says, with a location and contact person. She scans the map quickly, memorizes the address, and tucks the card into her safety vest. After a round of damp but cheerful good-mornings, she remounts her bicycle and pushes off to dodge the puddles.

🌹

The wooden flower display cart at the farmer's market is not just for aesthetics, Anthy learns early on. It is also the sole means of transporting flowers to and from the city center. The four wheels roll smoothly, though, and the handle fits comfortably in her hand. This rainy morning, she arrives early, working alone in the peaceful greenhouse. She loads squat barrels filled with water from the rainwater collection tanks, packs them with fresh flower stems, and rolls the wagon out and down the unpaved wheel tracks to the pedestrian road.

The wheel ruts are muddy, but once she reaches the road the cart moves smoothly. It is a flat path with few twists or turns to get from the greenhouse to the market. Anthy takes it at a comfortable walking pace, unbothered by the weather. She has become more aware of heat and cold, ever since the revolution, and body sensations in general. The rain is pleasant as it hits her face, with no glasses to streak up, and the jacket keeps her dry and warm. Chu-Chu stays cozy in her pocket.

The rain comes down heavier as she turns into the cobbled square, where other vendors are setting up their own booths. Some purveyors of more delicate specialties may not peddle their wares today, lest the wet should ruin their goods. Anthy opens a large umbrella that stands up in the middle of the cart. It will keep the shower off of shoppers browsing the blooms, and flowers don't mind the rain.

Steady rainfall does not prevent more adventurous souls from seeking their produce and bread, and as the clock tolls the eighth hour Anthy welcomes her first customers of the day.

🌹

The streets of the city are streamlined for streetcar and pedestrian usage, with room for bicycles to weave through them like maypole ribbons. The couriers are earning their tips today, pedaling hard through rains that have intensified into a true summer storm. After her jumbled morning, Utena is improperly dressed for the rain, and feeling foolish.

The caterers have requested a pickup from a local goat farmstand, meat and cheese, as well as a variety of vegetables. The rainproof saddlebags on her bicycle will keep the cargo dry, if not their driver. She takes a shortcut through a garment district alleyway and across one of the city parks, and makes it to the farmer's market just as the clock tower strikes eight o'clock. The goat farm stall is still setting out their products, evidently having had a harder journey than usual in this weather. She thanks the vegetable farmers and loads her panniers with onions and chard and fennel, then seeks out a hot drink. She's soaked through from helmet to cleats and doesn't want to catch a chill. She nurses a demitasse of spiced black tea from a vendor of herbal preparations, crowding under their awning with her bicycle while she waits for the goat stall to raise its own rain canopy. Then she hands back her empty cup, drops a tip in the tip jar, and wheels over to pick up the rest of her cargo.

She leaves the market by a different route than she came in, for ease of egress. It means passing by stalls she hasn't seen yet today, which is pleasant even if she is not in the best condition to enjoy herself. The patissier waves to her from behind a basket of croissants, and Utena grins and nods back as rain runs down her nose. She sniffs and wipes it. Tonight might call for a hot bath, she muses. The flour and grain cart isn't here today, but the flower cart is, right at the end of the row. Utena squints through wet lashes to see if her friend the gardener is working, but someone else seems to be selling the flowers today. She tries to get a better look at the new girl, but getting close to the cart means that the cloying fragrance of wet roses swamps her. She coughs and shakes her head as her stomach turns the lovely tea she just drank to acid.

The girl at the booth looks up in concern, but Utena waves her away with a sheepish grimace, brings her bicycle to the curb and climbs on as quickly as she can. The damp air makes the scent carry, but she'll be out of range before long. She pushes off, shaking a little now. It's only a few blocks to get out of the city center tangle, and then she'll be back on the riverside path and can bike hard enough to warm back up and shake off the nausea. She enters traffic without looking.

🌹

Anthy drops an armful of lilies into a mud puddle.

"Utena," she whispers, staring after the drenched bike punk. "Utena."

The cyclist looks as if she is going to be ill. She acknowledges Anthy's presence without recognition and then prepares to take off.

"Utena," Anthy says again, finding her voice. "Utena!"

A bewildered customer is protesting, picking her ruined flowers out of the puddle, but her words sound like they are coming from underwater. Anthy's entire attention is focused on Utena, Utena, she's here but she's leaving again, how did she get so close without Anthy feeling her near?

Anthy realizes in the next moment that the home feeling she got from the city, the feeling that made her decide to stay, it's the feeling she felt with Utena, when the two of them were together, the feeling she thought she could never keep. Utena is home. Home is in the city. Utena is in the city, and she is about to bicycle away.

"Utena!" Anthy cries out, at the top of her voice, just as Utena rides out in front of an oncoming streetcar.

🌹

_Do you know, do you know? Do you think you know?_

All revolutions are about sacrifice. All sacrifice is about love.

Love is the strongest force in the universe. When it opens up, when it willingly surrenders to the hundred thousand cutting blades of hatred, it is the only force in the universe that can transmute hate's poison. The ferocity of love is the neutralizer of hate.

_Extra, extra!_

Once upon a time, there was an accident. The girl was all over the newspapers for days after it. They found her far away. She was alone, badly injured. The wound in her back was horrific. Doctors worried the spinal cord might be severed. She might have nerve damage, she might die, she might never walk again.

She healed. She walked. She recovered. She settled in the city. She remembered nothing from before. How can you remember what was never real? It felt like holding onto a dream after waking: the tighter you grip it, the faster it falls away.

The world healed. The world recovered. It had been revolutionized. One very old girl-shaped creature finally became a girl again. She had her own name and her own body and her own autonomy, which was very novel indeed.

_Do you really know?_

Can a witch ever really become a princess? It's a trick question. Better to be neither.

Better to focus more on love and less on fairy tales, don't you think?

_Do you know, do you know? Do you think you know?_

🌹

Anthy is not prepared to watch Utena shatter again before her eyes, so she throws a Hail Mary.

With a few words of incantation, she pulls forth the final remaining threads of her waning power and hurls them between Utena and the speeding streetcar. There is a burst of light, and Utena and her bicycle are knocked back, but the streetcar halts completely without collision. From the looks of the cable above, its electricity has been cut, which explains the car turning off but not its immediate loss of momentum, or lack of jostling inside. The conductor will later cite it as a demonstration of the automatic safety braking system and be awarded a promotion.

Anthy, chest aching and hollow, dashes out in her clomping rubber boots to the middle of the street. She skids to a halt, overall knees grinding into the mud, and grabs Utena's hand. Her heart is racing in a way she has never felt before.

"Utena," she says, "Utena." Now that she's really here Anthy can't stop repeating it.

Utena groans softly. Is she awake or asleep? Anthy isn't sure. Neither is Utena.

Something has cushioned her blow somewhat, Utena thinks, but her bike is probably wrecked and she's going to be behind schedule and the delivery pickup is definitely spoiled. She tries to shift, assess her road rash, but she feels heavy. Maybe she really is sleeping. Maybe today never happened.

Someone is holding her hand. She squints up, but her head is pounding and the rain is in her eyes and the edge of her helmet is blocking her view. She might also be crying. It's hard to tell. Perhaps she is in shock.

"Who's there?" she asks.

"I came to find you," says Anthy.

"But who are you?"

"I came all this way to be with you," Anthy says, leaning over Utena's face to block the rain from her eyes, "so don't be afraid."

Utena blinks up again and her eyes finally focus. Something in her solar plexus unlocks. She recognizes it as the ache she woke up with this morning. Suddenly she is definitely crying, cold and shaky, hurting with a pain that she's sealed off for years. She fumbles to unclip her helmet. 

"You…" she chokes out, "it's you, it's you isn't it? It's really you?" 

Anthy carefully puts an arm under Utena's scraped and bruised shoulders and pulls her head into her lap. It's the middle of a busy street in the middle of a downpour and the two of them are sitting together, hearts breaking open, crying, stopping the world for just a moment.

Anthy has just sacrificed her last shreds of magic and immortality and could not have wished for a better way to do it. "Utena…" she says again, softly, stroking back the wet pink hair.

Utena reaches up and touches Anthy's face, and then her sobs turn into pained laughter, and she pulls her battered arms around Anthy's waist to hug her tightly. Chu-Chu and the lily customer stand together by the curb, watching with emotion as the two girls embrace in the street.

After revolution comes rebuilding. After pruning comes regrowth. A cut stem needs time to put out new roots, and those roots need time to take hold. Anthy has spent five years searching for her lost champion, and Utena has spent five years healing from trying to live up to a fairy tale.

The revolution is past. The soil is wet. The city is their home. Perhaps now, together, finally, they can grow and bloom and shine.

 

_The End._

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to @redcirce for their invaluable, meticulous, reliable, and untiring work as a beta-reader and editor. I'm glad I had some girls for you this time.


End file.
